The Vance dining room had been designed, Ethan sometimes thought, to make people feel small on purpose. Twenty-foot ceilings. A table long enough to seat sixteen, though it had never once been set for more than four in his lifetime.
His mother had chosen the room. She had chosen the table, the sconces, the particular shade of gray on the north wall that the decorator had argued against and lost. Richard had not changed a single object in it in eleven years, which Ethan had always assumed was sentiment until, somewhere in his late twenties, it had occurred to him that a room preserved that carefully was not a memorial. It was an exhibit.
Nobody in the family said her name at this table. Ethan had stopped noticing that at some point, the way you stop noticing a sound that never varies.
To
